Hundreds of auction sites are currently accessible via the Internet, with more coming on-line everyday. Many types of products and services are bought and sold via these on-line auction sites. For example eBay (www.ebay.com) and Auction.com (www.auction.com) allow visitors to participate in auctions for items in various categories, including collectibles, antiques, sports memorabilia, jewelry, and the like. OnSale (www.onsale.com) and uBid (www.ubid.com) allow visitors to participate in auctions for computer products, sports and fitness equipment, electronics equipment, travel packages, and the like.
In addition, some enterprises offer their own products and services for sale through auctions conducted on their own Web sites. For example, The Sharper Image (650 Davis Street, San Francisco, Calif.) conducts auctions on their web site (www.sharperimage.com) that allow consumers to bid on products offered for sale by The Sharper Image. Winning bids may be treated like normal purchase transactions between buyers and The Sharper Image, similar to buying from The Sharper Image store, catalog, or Internet store.
Because of the proliferation of on-line auction sites, identical items may be offered for sale at more than one auction site. For example, a consumer interested in purchasing a particular model of Nikon® brand binoculars may find the particular model of binoculars offered for sale on the eBay auction site, on the uBid auction site, as well as on the auction sites of various retailers. To obtain the best “deal”, the consumer may be required to visit each of these auction sites periodically to monitor an ongoing auction.
Some auction sites may require pre-registration of buyers and sellers. Consumers wishing to view items currently being auctioned, to bid on an item, or to offer an item for sale, may have to enter a user identification and password to gain entry. As such, accessing multiple auction sites to monitor various auctions may become burdensome, particularly if a consumer is required to enter passwords and user identifications each time.
Accordingly, it would be desirable for consumers to be able to search multiple auction sites easily for information relating to items being auctioned without being required to visit each auction site. Various Web sites have emerged recently which attempt to “aggregate” or collect auction information from multiple auction sites and present the data to consumers. For example, BidFind (www.bidfind.com) utilizes a “bot” or “crawler” that visits multiple on-line auction sites to collect data associated with various items offered for sale at each auction site. This auction item data is conventionally collected by parsing the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) code of various web pages at an auction site and extracting data related to auction items from the HTML code.
Unfortunately, conventional methods of parsing HTML code, and extracting auction item data therefrom, may be inaccurate and inefficient. A conventional crawler typically parses HTML code line-by-line in a sequential manner. For large Web sites having many web pages and many lines of HTML code, parsing via a conventional crawler may be time consuming, as well. Furthermore, crawlers may not be able to accurately distinguish between auction item data and other data within HTML code, especially since auction site owners are able to change the position and format of auction item data on their Web pages. Accordingly, some auction item data may be incorrect and some may be missing. In addition, there may be a time lag between when a crawler parses HTML code at a particular web site and when the extracted auction item data is available to consumers at an auction search site. As such, auction data obtained via conventional crawler methods may not be timely and, consequently, may be of lesser value to consumers.
As such, it would be desirable to be able to search many different auction sites for auction item data and to present this data to consumers, quickly, accurately and efficiently. From a buyer's standpoint, it would be desirable to quickly locate auction sites having particular items offered for sale. From a seller's standpoint, it would be desirable to quickly locate the best auction sites through which to offer products/services for sale.